RAB
by mAd4H-p
Summary: Set just before he removes the locket from the cave, Regulus watches Bellatrix torture a young girl, knowing he cannot continue living like this.


From Regulus Blacks point of view. He thinks about being a Death Eater, family and life. Set just before he removed the locket from the cave. Read and review :)

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><p>She's screaming.<p>

She can't be any older than seven or eight. What a man I am, for capturing her, bringing her to the Dark Lord. She's been bought in for being half blood, this I know. Brought in simply because her father is one of the last in the line of one of the oldest pure blood families in Britain, and because her mother is his wife. A mudblood. This is their punishment for daring to marry, for daring to love each other. Usually half bloods are ok with the Dark Lord (or at least good enough to fight for his cause) but the girl's father is particularly outspoken against him, and this is his punishment.

All my life I have been raised to hate those of muggle parentage, and muggles themselves, and I feel that this feeling, this hatred, this constant anger will never truly leave me. Though I really wish it would. I don't want to feel this way anymore, I don't want to hate people without reason. Often I wish I was as brave as Sirius, and had turned against my family, but I know I would never have been able to go through with it-they are my family no matter what, and my loyalty is to them _no matter what_.

Or so I believed.

I was just sixteen when I joined the Dark Lord, cousin Bella used her influence and I was granted this _honour_ much earlier than many Death Eaters. In truth I am not much older now, yet it feels as if many years have passed since I was given the mark.

The mark! Sometimes I want to claw at the flesh on my arm until no trace can be seen, until I forget that I ever made the stupid mistake of even considering the Dark Lord.

"Mudblood bitch!" raved darling cousin Bella as she crucioed the little girl, whose sole sin was to be born.

I had never actually met the Dark Lord before I joined, I was nowhere near significant enough, but I had listened to Bella and Cissy's husband speak of him all the time. Had watched many Slytherins in school join the Death Eater's ranks; Snape, Avery, Rosier (I ignored that many of them didn't, perhaps I was desperate to be sure this was the path for me, because I knew that with a family like mine, it was always going to be my path). Maybe at the time I was too foolish to appreciate what I was getting myself into. Well I know now.

I watched the other houses, their attitudes to Slytherins, they loathed us without even knowing us, yet the purebloods were family no matter how distantly related whether they liked it or not. You would have thought that some may have given us the benefit of the doubt, but they wanted nothing to do with us, even those who had grown up with some of the future Slytherins, as soon as the houses were sorted, we were divided, separate, abandoned- they chose the mudblood's.

And that brings me on wonderfully to my _dear_ brother. Brave, charming, effortlessly intelligent and arrogant Sirius Black. A lion in a family of snakes. He hates me, and the feeling is mutual. Yet I hate him for a very different reason to my family, to them he is no longer welcome because he didn't accept their ways, and eventually chose to run away, turning his back on them forever. I used to pretend this was the reason I hated him too- it would be foolish not to- but in truth I hated him because he gave up on me. As soon as I was sorted into Slytherin he saw no good in me and didn't even try to help his own brother who he watched fall in with a bad crowd. In fact I was the victim of many of his pranks. Now the reason I hate him is more because he left me, he was the brave one, the Gryffindor, I am a Slytherin-brave yes but not in the foolish way of Gryffindors- and he left me without anything, what was I supposed to do, on one hand I had him telling me I was an idiot, running off without me, and on the other hand I the rest of my family and peers telling me to join the Dark Lord. Supporting me. What choice did I have but to listen to them?

I was stuck.

Yet no matter how much I hate him I will always love him as he is my brother. However I do sometimes wonder if he loves me at all.

"Why hasn't your father come to find you yet?" Bella cackled, "maybe he realises you are the disgusting spawn of a mudblood, and he would be glad if we killed you!"

I miss the days of being a normal teenage boy, of flying along on a broomstick, of playing Quiddich against Sirius's awful friend Potter. Those days are long over, with no chance of them returning in my lifetime. I have grownup so much in the last few months I sometimes don't even truly remember who I am, I've lost all sense of being, my every thought is of death, of torture, of rape. Screaming family's, muggle and magical, haunt me while I sleep-those rare occasions when I do sleep.

A few days ago, I found out something about the Dark Lord. He made a big mistake using Kreacher. Poor Kreacher, when I found out what had happened that was it, I wanted nothing more to do with the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters. It finally got to me after I had tried so hard to make myself numb, to stop myself feeling what I was doing. I had never mastered it.

Though you don't simply leave the Death Eaters when you feel like it, the only escape is to die.

It is strange to realise you are accepting death willingly at the age of eighteen, but I have, I am going to die because I don't care anymore, I just want it to end.

But I am not going to die a pointless death, what I found out has given me a way to help the cause to kill the Dark Lord. I want to be a part of that, no matter how small.

He will probably have me killed when he finds out my disloyalty, but I want that, so really there is no punishment for it, and I will die with the satisfaction that one of his horcruxes is gone, he is slightly closer to mortality, and the hope that one day the boy in the prophesy will destroy him.

"Please …stop…" the girl sobbed, curled up helplessly in a ball on the ground. The cause of the Death Eaters is _indeed _noble.


End file.
